The growth in demand for telecommunication services is increasing at an ever-quickening pace. The majority of the demand is being driven by the explosion in the use of the Internet and a steady stream of new applications being introduced which further increase the demand for increased bandwidth. With time, a smaller and smaller portion of Internet traffic is carried by circuit switched transport facilities. In the case of Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), a significant part of the traffic is transported over SONET/SDH based networks most of which were originally resigned for voice traffic. With time, more and more customers are using the networks for transporting data rather than voice.
The requirements for networked communications within the user community have changed dramatically over the past two decades. Several notable trends in the user community include (1) the overwhelming domination of Ethernet as the core networking media around the world; (2) the steady shift towards data-oriented communications and applications; and (3) the rapid growth of mixed-media applications. Such applications include everything from integrated voice/data/video communications to the now commonplace exchanges of MP3 music files and also existing voice communications which have migrated heavily towards IP/packet-oriented transport.
Ethernet has become the de facto standard for data-oriented networking within the user community. This is true not only within the corporate market, but many other market segments as well. In the corporate market, Ethernet has long dominated at all levels, especially with the advent of high-performance Ethernet switching. This includes workgroup, departmental, server and backbone/campus networks. Even though many of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the market today still base their WAN-side communications on legacy circuit oriented connections (i.e. supporting Frame Relay, xDSL, ATM, SONET) in addition to Ethernet in a significant part of the newer installations, their back-office communications are almost exclusively Ethernet. In the residential market, most individual users are deploying 10 or 100 Mbps Ethernet within their homes to connect PCs to printers and to other PCs (in fact, most PCs today ship with internal Ethernet cards) even though the residential community still utilizes a wide range of circuit-oriented network access technologies.
The use of Ethernet, both optical and electrical based, is increasing in carrier networks due to advantages of Ethernet and particularly Optical Ethernet, namely its ability to scale from low speeds to very high rates and its commodity-oriented nature. With the rapid increase in the demand for user bandwidth, and the equally impressive increase in the performance of Ethernet with the LAN environment, the demand for Metropolitan network performance is rapidly increasing. In response, there has been a massive explosion in the amount of fiber being installed into both new and existing facilities. This is true for both the corporate and residential markets.
Virtual private LAN service (VPLS) is a way to provide Ethernet based multipoint to multipoint communication over Internet Protocol (IP)/Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks. It allows geographically dispersed sites to share an Ethernet broadcast domain by connecting sites through pseudo-wires. Example technologies that can be used as pseudo-wire include Ethernet over MPLS, L2TPv3, etc. Two IETF standards that track RFCs describing VPLS establishment include RFC 4761 “Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) Using BGP for Auto-Discovery and Signaling” and RFC 4762 “Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) Using Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) Signaling”.
VPLS is a virtual private network (VPN) technology which allows any-to-any (multipoint) connectivity. In a VPLS, the local area network (LAN) at each site is extended to the edge of the provider network. The provider network then emulates a switch or bridge to connect all of the customer LANs to create a single bridged LAN.
A VPLS creates an emulated LAN segment for a given set of users. It provides a layer 2 broadcast domain that is capable of learning and forwarding using Ethernet MAC addresses for a given set of users.
Today, Ethernet is the predominant technology used for Local Area Network (LAN) connectivity and is gaining acceptance as an access technology as well. This is true especially in Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs). In a typical scenario, an Ethernet port connects a customer to the Provider Edge (PE) device. Customer traffic is subsequently mapped to a specific MPLS-based Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (VPN).
Traditional LANs provide unicast, broadcast and multicast services. Locations that belong to the same broadcast domain and that are connected via an MPLS network expect broadcast, multicast and unicast traffic to be forwarded to the proper locations. This requires MAC address learning on a per LSP basis, forwarding unicast destination traffic according to the learned information, packet replication across LSPs for multicast/broadcast traffic and for flooding of unknown unicast destination traffic.
A main goal of Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) is to provide connectivity between customer sites situated in the MAN or WAN as if they were connected via a LAN. To accomplish this, a major attribute of Ethernet must be provided, namely the flooding of broadcast traffic, multicast traffic, and traffic with unknown destination MAC addressed to all ports. To provide flooding within a VPLS, all unicast unknown address, broadcast and multicast frames are flooded over the corresponding “pseudo-wires” to all relevant provider edge nodes that participate in the VPLS. Note that multicast packets are a special case and are not necessarily flooded to all VPN members. A pseudo-wire is a made up of a pair of unidirectional virtual circuit Label Switched Paths (LSPs). Throughout this document, the terms pseudo-wire and transport-entity are used to denote a point-to-point logical link connecting different nodes in the network, regardless of the technology used for its implementation, e.g., MPLS, etc. Depending on the technology, the pseudo-wire may be an MPLS-VC, a point-to-point Virtual LAN (VLAN)-based trail, an ATM-VC, etc.
A provider edge node uses different techniques to associate packets received from the client with connections. Example techniques include port mapping and VLAN mapping in which the received packet is associated with a connection according to the provider edge device port from which it was received or according to the port from which it was received as well as the VLAN with which it is tagged, respectively. Packets mapped to a VPLS connection, are forwarded to one or more of the sites associated with that particular VPLS connection. In case of a VPLS connection, the forwarding is performed by bridging-capable nodes throughout the network, that bridge between pseudo-wires dedicated to that VPLS. The pseudo-wires are point-to-point ‘sub-connections’ of that VPLS, functioning to connect the bridging-capable nodes. These bridging capable nodes must be able to first associate the received packet with a VPLS and then, within the context of the VPLS, associate a destination MAC address (or a destination MAC-address and VLAN-tag value) with a pseudo-wire comprising that VPLS in order to forward a packet. It is not practical to require these provider nodes to statically configure an association of every possible destination MAC address with a pseudo-wire. Thus, a bridging mechanism is required to dynamically learn MAC addresses (or MAC-address and VLAN pairs) on both physical ports and virtual circuits and to forward and replicate packets across both physical ports and pseudo-wires to which they are associated.
Provider edge (PE) devices participating in a VPLS-based VPN must appear as an Ethernet bridge to connected customer edge (CE) devices. Received Ethernet frames must be treated in such a way as to ensure CEs can be simple Ethernet devices. When a PE receives a frame from a CE, it inspects the frame and learns the source MAC address, storing it locally along with LSP routing information. It then checks the frame's destination MAC address. If it is a broadcast or multicast frame, or the MAC address is not known to the PE, it floods the frame to all PEs in the mesh.
Bridging functionality operates on the original Layer 2 portion of the packet. The bridge functions to learn new source MAC addresses of ingress packets and to associate them with the outbound pseudo-wire it is to be sent out on.